Some Apple Employees Have 'Concerns' About iOS 26.4's Revamped Siri

[JaydenA]

For me, the largest concern with a "personal context" is privacy. Siri is prone to accidental waking, so the addition of your current screen being sent off to the cloud on a false activation, with all the associated data hoovered in training risks, is a place I don't want to be. And yes, i know Siri is processed in the cloud, but it's not currently getting all that context bundled in/

Siri is dumb as a bucket of hair, but for simple tasks like "set a timer" and "what's the news" it is fine 80% of the time (about the same reliability of the top performing LLMs except Siri only 'finds this for you on the web' instead of the LLM making the made up facts sound plausible).

I imagine it will go behind a switch, but if we look how much of "Apple Intelligence" still remains while it's supposed to be turned off, so just on the current state, I do fear that even with Siri turned off, the screen context will still eb sent to some AI company and leaked.

I really hope Apple pull back from this, and differentiate themselves from Google and Microsoft. People who wish to interact with these markov chains, can already install one of their existing apps.

 

[macsimcon]

Would it kill Apple to fix autocorrect across all devices? Correct words are replaced, incorrect words are ignored. Misspelled words are often ignored, while correctly spelled words are sometimes corrected to something completely irrelevant.

It's unacceptable to have iOS around for almost two decades, and autocorrect is still a total f***ing s***show.

 

[JPack]

No, I'm well aware of what the concerns might be (though I'm not particularly concerned that some Apple employees would be willing to leave for obscene and unjustifiable pay packages from Meta). But absent any details at all the only conclusion is that Gurman has none.

Which leads me back to: "Some Apple employees concerned" is no more a story than "Apple working on next year's iPhone."

It literally reads:

“Already, there are concerns from people testing iOS 26.4 — the OS version slated to include the new Siri — about the voice assistant’s performance.”

 

[sykeward]

Mark Gurman has had a few misses lately (See: “AirPods Pro 3 will have almost no improvements over the AP2”). Even if this story is true, I can’t think of a safer prediction than “some nameless people are worried that Siri might not be good enough when it comes out months from now”. He’s effectively saying nothing.

 

[I7guy]

So now after the lawsuit it's become private because they say it's private but in the past before the lawsuit it wasn't private while they said it's private.

And now you know what privacy is worth. $20. Since there was no admission of wrongdoing one can’t say whether or not Apple lied.

 

[jz0309]

It literally reads:

“Already, there are concerns from people testing iOS 26.4 — the OS version slated to include the new Siri — about the voice assistant’s performance.”

yeah, for those who have access to the original.
for those who only read MR it reads "some Apple employees ... some of Apple's SW engineers ...", no mention of people testing 26.4 ...

it's unfortunate that MR "summarizes" in the way they do ... I've been falling into that trap myself and thankfully @klasma has corrected me a couple times

 

[dugbug]

Well look on the bright side. They never had concerns with the old Siri

 

[chmania]

Oh, Siri? Who is Siri?

Have to ask ChatGPT...

 

[jarman92]

It literally reads:

“Already, there are concerns from people testing iOS 26.4 — the OS version slated to include the new Siri — about the voice assistant’s performance.”

Which people? What are their "concerns"? Is it slow? Bad at parsing requests? Wrong? Does it fail often? Is the UI bad/unfinished? Are they concerned about timing? How does it compare to Gemini or Alexa? How is it architected? Does it run on an Apple LLM or on ChatGPT? Do they have privacy concerns? What does leadership think?...

Any combo of those—even one of them!—would be worth reporting; this is nothing.

 

[mxrider88]

I had to check the date on the article, I was sure I read this a year ago!

 

[mxrider88]

Which people? What are their "concerns"? Is it slow? Bad at parsing requests? Wrong? Does it fail often? Is the UI bad/unfinished? Are they concerned about timing? How does it compare to Gemini or Alexa? How is it architected? Does it run on an Apple LLM or on ChatGPT? Do they have privacy concerns? What does leadership think?...

Any combo of those—even one of them!—would be worth reporting; this is nothing.

It’s most likely all of them, while running on chat gpt. They have a talent for butchering software

 

[emmab2006]

looks like we found Something apple cant do 😹

 

[richinaus]

Vision Pro had the same concerns internally from employees and of course it flopped.

Revamped Siri disaster incoming.

how are you measuring a flop exactly?

 

[Hajj.david]

how are you measuring a flop exactly?

They are wondering why an expensive spatial computer thats really the first of kind isn't selling like a cheap macbook air. People call it a flop but I never hear the sale numbers for the studio or the mac pro which is also a specialty device.

 

[macdaddy43]

Just give us the ability to further integrate other AI models into the OS. If you are this far behind and still going to be releasing an embarrassing product, just let us pick something else at this point...

 

[User 6502]

Oh boy..

Last time there were "concerns" leaking out, Apple* pushed out the Vision Pro flop.




*well, in reality, Tim Cook personally forced it out hoping for his own iPhone moment

And half the forum was telling how it was going to be great and it would not look at all like the hideous thing shown in the leaks. In fact they said they were looking forward to the announcement except it looked exactly like that 😂. I suspect these people will also say the new Siri is amazing even if it turned out to be really bad.

 

[jz0309]

Which people? What are their "concerns"? Is it slow? Bad at parsing requests? Wrong? Does it fail often? Is the UI bad/unfinished? Are they concerned about timing? How does it compare to Gemini or Alexa? How is it architected? Does it run on an Apple LLM or on ChatGPT? Do they have privacy concerns? What does leadership think?...

Any combo of those—even one of them!—would be worth reporting; this is nothing.

This is Gurman ...

 

[User 6502]

As an aside, Vision Pro may be a flop to you, but Apple you can bet, got a lot out of it and doesn’t consider it a flop.

I don’t think I could find a better example of being delusional. Very few products in Apple’s history are more a flop than the Vision Pro is. It’s so bad it only had a minor upgrade years later and it’s almost guaranteed to be discontinued altogether. If this is not a flop I don’t know what is.

 

[turbineseaplane]

Would it kill Apple to fix autocorrect across all devices? Correct words are replaced, incorrect words are ignored. Misspelled words are often ignored, while correctly spelled words are sometimes corrected to something completely irrelevant.

It's unacceptable to have iOS around for almost two decades, and autocorrect is still a total f***ing s***show.

You mean a ducking shot show?

 

[DakotaGuy]

I hope Apple’s entrance into AI works out better than the time they tried to enter into social networking with Ping.

 

[turbineseaplane]

I don’t think I could find a better example of being delusional. Very few products in Apple’s history are more a flop than the Vision Pro is. It’s so bad it only had a minor upgrade years later and it’s almost guaranteed to be discontinued altogether. If this is not a flop I don’t know what is.

Yeah, I'm not sure what to say anymore.
If one doesn't think the Vision Pro is a flop, I don't know what would ever be considered a flop to that person.

 

[hottyson]

I miss the days of Steve Jobs worshiping where we would live for and be presented with functioning products that were simple to use. People complained that Steve Jobs was an overly fierce slave driver, but I the end user didn't care since I was rewarded as long as I parted ways with large sums of money.

 

[tyranne201]

I hope it gets released so Tim cooked gets fired

 

[tyranne201]

I miss the days of Steve Jobs worshiping where we would live for and be presented with functioning products that were simple to use. People complained that Steve Jobs was an overly fierce slave driver, but I the end user didn't care since I was rewarded as long as I parted ways with large sums of money.

no company lives forever. I think chinese companies are catching up fast. the old apple doesn't exist anymore.

the 2025 apple has no clue what is doing.

Vision Pro is the opposite of jobs vision: it's an expensive product and a niche for rich people. that's was never the intention for iPad and iPhone.

 

[I7guy]

I don’t think I could find a better example of being delusional.

What I think is delusional are those who don’t believe Apple got anything out of Vision Pro and have reached into the inner most sanctum of Apple and devined the product to be a flop.

Very few products in Apple’s history are more a flop than the Vision Pro is.

Out of curiosity what are those other very few products?

It’s so bad it only had a minor upgrade years later and it’s almost guaranteed to be discontinued altogether. If this is not a flop I don’t know what is.

My HomePod og is still going strong and getting updates. A flop also? Or a first cut at technology and a form factor that lead to something else?